


Unexpected Kindness

by SerpentsKiss



Category: Angels and Demons - Fandom, Christian Bible, Christian Lore, Christian Scripture & Lore
Genre: F/M, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-07
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-23 22:21:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1581530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerpentsKiss/pseuds/SerpentsKiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucifer goes to pick up a soul Forsaken by God. He could never have expected what he finds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unexpected Kindness

**Author's Note:**

> This Lucifer has elements from many myths and many different depictions in pop culture. If you're strongly religious, this may upset or offend you. Not my intent, which is why I'm warning you now. If you appreciated works like Good Omens or Supernatural, however, please read on, as I'm sure you'll enjoy this.

It was rare that the Creator completely forsook a human being. His Son, of course (or rather, the adopted child he chose to destroy), and a handful of others. It was a sort of unspoken agreement between God and Lucifer that when God forsook, Death did not collect the souls and deliver them to their places of rest (or distress). Instead, Lucifer himself would pay a call and take the soul directly to Hell, with all of the usual lack of passing “Go” and collecting an arbitrary amount of money.

It was on such an errand that Lucifer found himself in the middle of the slums of Paris in the sixteenth century. The air was heavy with rain, everything looking unpleasantly gray and desolate. It made even Lucifer uneasy as he sauntered slowly down an empty street, scrutinizing each building in turn. Eventually, cued by some insight that only he recognized, he turned in at one of the doorways and took himself quickly up the stairs of the rickety building.

It was a brothel, apparently. The room he breezed through at the bottom of the stairs was full of filthy whores, stinking of drink and sweat and the smells of stale sex. The men they were entertaining looked and smelled even worse. No one noticed Lucifer as he passed by and made for the first landing. There he looked around again, then proceeded to the second when he did not find what he sought. Here, too, he passed by, advancing at last into a tiny, dark attic room.

It took a moment for even the Lord of Hell's eyes to adjust. The room, when at last he could see it, was mostly empty. Just a pallet against one wall, and a tiny brazier to warm it, and a (blessedly clean) chamber pot nearby. On the pallet, covered in rags, lay a woman.

She was hardly more than a girl, really. Her body was far too thin, and once-full breasts sagged sadly against her shallowly moving chest. Her hands were frail and clutched together, curled around her knees in an effort to keep warm. She was clothed, but barely. What she wore was relatively clean, and relatively well-mended – relative to the amount of cloth left to be clean, or mended. The pile of rags covering her was rather generous, considering the look of the place. Perhaps she was well-loved by the other whores here. Either way, she seemed well-cared for... relatively.

Well enough, thought Lucifer. He had seen sadder, more pitiful, more alone. For the area and the time and the occupation, this woman didn't have it too badly. Someone was caring for her, not allowing her to die covered in filth and all by herself. Interesting, though, that someone the All-Loving had forsaken be so attended to. He wondered again why the Lord had turned away from her. He wondered if she knew.

One of the worn boards under his feet creaked as he moved slowly across the floor toward the girl. She turned her head to either side, seeming to look for whoever was there. However, as her eyes slid across him not once but twice, he realized that she was blind. Interesting.

“Mary?” Her voice was rough and tired, seeming almost to splinter in her throat. The name was accompanied by a cough that made her thin frame tremble and caused the rags to slide even further off her body.

“Not Mary.” Lucifer came closer, paused, then pulled the pathetic excuses for blankets back over her torso. “Though I am here to see you.”

The girl was silent for a moment, though her hand reached up toward him as if she was looking for something. Lucifer glanced around for something to hand her, then realized that she was seeking him. Hesitantly, he met her hand with his, and let her clasp it.

“Well, sir.” She cleared her throat, and the way the words stuck in her throat seemed to ease slightly. “There's not much I can do for you now, but if you came to see me, I suppose that all I can do is my best.”

Confused, Lucifer reached out and touched her hair. She couldn't mean – the girl was dying. After all, that was what he was here for – to take her away. Surely money could mean nothing to her now. How could she expect...

Her other hand wandered up, patting over his arm and up to his shoulder, and from there to his face, which she cupped in chilly fingers. “What can I do for you, then?” said she, turning from her side onto her back.

“... I think you're confused.” Lucifer said, his voice unusually gentle. “I'm not here to...” His mind hastily flicked through phrase after phrase. Use you... no. Take you – no. Take advantage of you – bless it! “I'm here to – to take you away.”

A long silence followed that statement. The girl knew, he could feel it. She understood. No one would take a dying whore anywhere, except perhaps a graveyard for early disposal. She may not think that he was her death angel – or something – but she surely knew that it was her time to go. The sounds of bawd and vulgar merriment penetrated, muffled, through the floorboards and rose up around them, making the moment even more painful in contrast.

With surprising strength, her arm hooked around his neck and drew him down. Caught by surprise, Lucifer let her pull him into a kiss that she somehow managed to make sweet even with dry and cracked lips.

“Every man is lonely,” she said, and her voice seemed to come from the darkness all around them and not from the lips against his. “But most especially the gravedigger, I'd gather.”

He gave up his discomfort after another of those sweet kisses and let her pull him down next to her. She was generous, even in her weakness, and he found himself lending her strength when hers flagged. To Lucifer's great surprise, and something else that touched him deeply, the dying woman made love to him tenderly, for his comfort and not her own. So attentive was she, and so affectionate, that he soon forgot the feel of her ribs under his hands in the fierceness of her will to please. She became, in his mind, the young woman she had been months ago, with plump breasts and a round ass and a laugh that made men turn their heads and loosen their laces. He turned his attention in return to pleasing her, something that he guessed she had rarely experienced. Though, in the end, he had to hold her head up to kiss him, though he had to support her legs so that he could pleasure her in spite of her weakness, she enjoyed the experience fully, and to his astonishment, so did he.

At the end, she encircled him in her thin arms and stroked his hair. “Lay your head, good sir. Rest until morning, and then you shall do what you like.”

He didn't argue with her. Obediently, he pillowed his head against her shoulder, and let her stroke his hair until she fell asleep. Only then did he shift, pulling her body against his chest and warming her with an arm wrapped protectively over her. He held her like that through the night, and until the early hours of the morning, when at last her spirit slipped free.

Then, tucking the rags carefully over the still body, he gathered up her soul and left.

For two days he wandered France in company of her soul, which he kept warmly tucked into the front of his shirt. The sheer pleasantness of the essence of her being was baffling to him, so much so that when he at last found what he was looking for, he was loathe to let it go.

It was a bright mid-afternoon, quite a contrast to the drizzly day on which she had passed. The town he came to was small, full of cheerful people clucking at their children and laughing to each other. The harvest was good, the livestock healthy. In fact, the only pocket of unhappiness in the little place was to be found in the home of a young farmer and his wife. His wife, still plump with recent childbirth, was weeping alone in her home, holding in her arms a child so sickly that she knew it could not live. The farmer, anxious at leaving her alone, was tending to his animals in a cloud of misery.

It was perfect.

Lucifer waited there, invisible in the corner, until the child's breath faded and its heartbeat slowed to a stop. Weeping, the woman clutched the little body close, then lay it in its cradle and went away to fetch her husband. The moment she was out the door, Lucifer lay the fragile soul he carried in the empty little body and settled it there, his own breath held in concentration as he rubbed life back into the little body, filling it with a robust and cheerful soul.

The change was dramatic and immediate. Life sparked back into the baby girl. Her skin lost its pallor and became pink again, and a quick slap to both of her tender feet made the child give a truly unholy howl. Lucifer stepped hastily back, covering his ears as he watched the farmer's wife bolt back into the room in shock.

The change in her was even more dramatic. The heartbroken woman became before his eyes a cooing mother bird, gathering the baby girl against her and smiling even beneath her tears of joy. “Praise God,” she said, over and over. Lucifer didn't mind, for once. She would never think to thank him, and that was fine. In his mind, he had repaid the young woman, offering her now a life in this tiny village where she would likely be married off to a young man at an early age, and have children of her own. If she were lucky, she would share a love like that of this farmer and his wife. Here she would not have to turn to whoring, to the risks that had brought her down.

He had an idea now, too, of why the Lord had turned his face away from this robust and joyful soul. As he watched the overjoyed woman dash out of the little house, baby girl clutched to her chest, he wondered if he would be visiting here again in thirty, forty, fifty years. That little girl would likely again begin to love humankind more than she ever loved the God that created it. He would likely again become jealous, and try to turn her away from her passion by showing her the wickedness of men.

And Lucifer, again, would stubbornly give her another chance. God would either have to take this one in, or deal with his handling of the situation. It was his fault, Lucifer thought, that God had finally managed to make a soul more perfect than himself. Jealous bastard.

 

It did indeed happen again. And again, and again. Lucifer watched the little girl grow up to be a wife, a mother, a doctor, an actress, a minister (that one really pissed God off), a writer, a politician, a scientist. Every life she lead made her fall more in love with humanity, no matter what hardships surrounded her. And with each lifetime she also became less enamored with the idea of God, until her most recent lifetimes became filled with joyful atheism. Lucifer watched her grow up time and again, and visited her in many guises. She began to recognize him, eventually, but only during the last moments that he inevitably shared with her.

At the end of her life as a scientist, she was fated to have a stroke. When Lucifer opened the door to her home office and stepped inside, she looked up. Dark hair was beginning to go gray around a pleasant face that briefly showed shock, then softened in a smile. Lucifer reflected that she always did die a little too young.

“You again,” she said, and sat back in her chair.

“Me again,” he agreed, and sat down in the chair across from her. He leaned forward, setting his elbows on the desk, and set his chin on one of his palms. She observed him quietly for a moment, tapping her pen almost impatiently on the edge of her notebook.

“I think I was about to discover a cure for cancer,” she said finally. “I don't suppose you could hold off a year or two.”

Lucifer sighed, then smiled at her. “You know that I would love to,” he said. “But take what you can get. Few humans are as lucky as you.”

“I've been meaning to ask you about that.” She set the pen down, looking at him more intently. “When I remember, of course, which is about ten minutes at the end of every lifetime. Why am I this lucky? For that matter, who the hell are you?”

He laughed, and reached over the desk to pick up her glass of wine and take a sip of it. “Because you love people so damn much, and so do I.”

“You didn't answer my second question.” She reclaimed her glass, fingers brushing his as she did so, and drained it, annoyed.

Lucifer relieved the table of his weight and settled back in his chair. “Atheists don't believe in me, my dear.”

She was silent a moment, her expression going distant. “... so he does exist.”

“God, you mean?” He tilted his head, studying her as intently as she had studied him. “Yes. But that doesn't mean that you should have faith in Him. He's a real asshole.”

This statement was met by a thoughtful nod. “I always thought so. I mean, that if he did exist, he had to be really awful. That still doesn't tell me who you are, though.”

He gazed at her levelly a moment, then reached out his hand to take hers. “Lucifer, my dear. Now, close your eyes.”

She obeyed him, her hand squeezing his. “I don't believe you.” But her voice was light, as if she were sparring with him over the subject. “What will I choose this time?”

Lucifer stood, and leaned over the desk to kiss her forehead just before she slumped over the desk. “That, my dear, is entirely up to you.”


End file.
